


Late Nights in the Library

by NorthwesternInsanity



Category: Def Leppard, Music RPF
Genre: AU, Gen, Library, M/M, Physics, Studying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-03-10
Packaged: 2019-03-29 08:21:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13923165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NorthwesternInsanity/pseuds/NorthwesternInsanity
Summary: Sav makes a trip across town to the city library to study with his best mate, and ultimately spend the night together.





	Late Nights in the Library

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SgtLeppard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SgtLeppard/gifts).



> This was originally posted to Rockfic for 2017's Ficmas, now backed up here. For SgtLeppard, who requested Sav and Steve studying in a library together!

With the straps of his backpack cutting into his shoulders under the weight of books, Sav trudged down the street from the bus stop against a harsh, biting current of winter wind. The air was still wet with an earlier downfall of slush that slipped under his boots, and though it was only early evening, the sun had already dipped below the horizon, turning the air an even darker cold. He tugged his scarf back from where the wind tried to rip it away from his stinging cheeks and let his wild hair free from its woolen binding so that the wet wind could get it all tangled up too.

All this to go to the twenty-four hour library in the city to study for upcoming finals rather than staying in the warmth of his home in Sheffield.

He had his reasons to justify it to himself, even if the weather made the idea of going out less than welcoming. The library had alternate versions of his textbooks he'd been studying with that had answer keys to the practice problems. Sav could use those to see if he'd done what he'd practiced earlier correctly.

That was one. The fact that he'd been inside for the past day and a half between studying and the weather was another. Those reasons still stood, but Sav was getting stir crazy. He could hardly sit still, let alone focus long enough to read pages out of a textbook or work through practice examples. A change of scenery was in order before any more productive work was going to happen.

Third, his good mate Steve had called earlier and said he was going to camp out at the library all day, and if Sav decided he needed help studying something or wanted to do it with someone, he could find him there.

So when Sav finally concluded over an hour ago that he had to get out of the house, he'd packed his backpack to the gills with books and paper for what he still needed to work on and geared himself to brave the elements for a fairly long bus ride with a substantial walk on either end.

He blew out a sigh of relief as he made it through the library doors, finally sheltered from the biting wind, and only paused a moment to wipe his boots on the mat and pull the scarf off his nose before continuing to the study area. An area of tables with chairs that could hold groups of various sizes. Some tables were rounded and designed to fit groups of up to eight, some square ones could do three or four, and then some small rectangular ones that could at best hold books for two.

Looking down the isle of tables, he caught the sight of a figure bent over books with platinum blond hair shielding his face, before looking up and shyly waving over.

Sav made his way over, setting down his backpack hard in the empty chair and ending his shoulders' cries for relief.

"Whew!" He whispered. "Hey, Steve."

"Finally decided to join me, eh?" Steve murmured.

"Yeah. Needed to go somewhere outside. Although I wish it weren't so bloody disgusting outside right now," Sav muttered darkly, finger-combing through the wet, tangled ends of his curls and pointing to them with an indignant look. "Made getting here a whole lot of fun."

"Sure is another reason why I'm not looking forward to when it's time to leave here. So, what are you gonna be working on here?" asked Steve.

"Just about everything I've got, and saving music theory to the end so I can at least have some fun after everything else. How about you right now, mate?"

Steve shook his head and winced.

"Physics, mate. Everything else, I looked over and practiced a tad earlier and felt comfortable with it, but physics, I swear it, that one is going to be the death of me. I need to study the reading portion of the music theory too though. We ought to meet up somewhere fun to work on that together, maybe tomorrow, so we can make the most of it."

"How the bloody world manages to make itself work in such a complicated way, I can't understand." Sav sighed and sat down, contemplating what he'd packed to study, physics being one of those areas. "Maybe I ought to start with that so we can work on it together. Any ideas you've got in mind for going somewhere else?"

"Not as of now. I suppose we'll think of that later too. I wouldn't be opposed to doing it here, but I like to demonstrate it in my guitar to see it, and something tells me the library staff might be opposed to that."

The librarian looked over from the desk and held her finger to her lips with the slightest lowering of her eyebrows.

"Yeah, you're probably right on that." Sav retrieved his paper and his spiral notebook which he'd tucked his table of trigonometry values into. "So, what are we doing? Reading through and working problems, and just helping each other try and figure it out when we get stuck?"

"Your plan there's as good as any I've got. Let's go for it," Steve agreed. He looked back down to his paper. "I'm about halfway through and maybe only just starting to get the hang of the ones with inclines and that God be damned circular motion. By the time I get the rest of it we'll both be ready to do something else."

Sav gave a muted laugh, setting himself up with the section of assigned practice problems in the book and some sheets of paper to work them out on in front of him. He stacked his other books and placed them on the table beside himself for later. Studying areas outside his scope of interest was tedious, to say the least. But he never minded it as much if he did it with Steve. It didn't matter if they were doing it somewhere outside on a nice day and able to joke snidely about the situation with free will, or if they were inside the library in a cold night and restricted to low whispers on a night like this.

Strength in numbers, as some called it. And not including the numbers on his paper describing how friction, gravity, tension, and the normal force effected how fast a box getting dragged up a ramp by a rope moved.

It was almost two hours before either of them dared break the silence or their focus, working through. Some of Sav's practice efforts earlier had worked out well. Others had not, and he was in the process of retracing his work and trying to figure out what he'd done wrong on each one keeping him from getting the final answer he should have gotten.

One of the ones he'd skipped and made a note to go back to must have been particularly hard, however, because it was exactly why Steve reached over and tapped Sav's arm.

"Sav, I'm not getting this one. Are you making any headway on it?"

Sav shifted his paper over.

"Stuck in a loop too," he groaned. "I know a coefficient of friction won't be as high as what I'm getting."

"Let me see -I'm not getting the value on the key, but I am getting a reasonable number." Steve looked over Sav's paper. "Is gravity supposed to directly oppose normal force on an incline? Because I thought it had to be broken up in components-"

"Oh, bloody hell, I set it up in the wrong order and everything's off now," Sav grumbled. "No, you keep working with what you've got, and I'll redo it and see if I get it. You at least had better idea than I did." 

He contemplated his paper, and deciding it was too covered in scrawl to spend the time erasing it, went to reach down for more in his book bag.

As he did, he slid his arm over too quick, knocking his elbow into the stack of books  
on the table. They wobbled, already having been hanging a couple of inches over the side of the table and unsteady.

"Oh, shit-!" Steve whimpered quietly.

Sav tried to reach over and grab the books, but the top one was already on it's way down, and the others were coming down too fast to try catching that one before they fell. Initially, Sav accepted the fate of the first and attempted to catch the bottom two, but the shiny covers slid against each other, making it impossible to keep hold on both of them with how heavy they were. When the one slipped out of his hands, it made his grip too wide for the last, so it quickly flopped down too, leaving all three textbooks in a pile on the floor.

_Ka-thump-thump-thump!_

The librarian looked over from the circulation desk and scowled. If looks could kill, this one would have warranted the emergency use of a defibrillator. She raised a finger to her lips.

_"SHHHHHH!!!"_

It seemed the head of every person that hadn't turned to look when the books had fallen were now turning after the big shushing.

Steve winced. Slowly, he turned his head to the side to look at Sav, who was ducked over his book, covering as much of his mouth and flaming cheeks with both hands, eyes wide as saucers.

"Care to try producing a dynamics or kinematics problem in those books and see if we can figure that one out easier since it's something we actually can see and do?" Steve whispered jokingly. He'd always found it was easier to make light of an embarrassment with someone else to help him do it, and only hoped to lighten it up for Sav.

Sav let out a slow, heavy sigh.

 _"No,"_ he said darkly. He reached down to pick the books up one by one, making sure they were completely on the table and a few good inches away from the edge this time.

"I think I'm going to try this problem again, and I might just be ready to switch to something else when I finish."

Steve looked over his paper, finding the simple error of a sine value switched where a cosine value should have been in his calculations, throwing everything off. Trying it again, this time he matched the answer key. It seemed even more frustrating that such a tiny little error could cause such a big problem, and more often than not, as proven by the last four hours he'd studied, ended up being the cause of trouble for him. After four hours, he was beginning to get fed up with it, and it seemed those tiny little errors were multiplying in frequency.

Maybe he was just ready to do something different too.

"You know, mate, I was going to keep practicing this for another half hour, but I'm think I'm done too." He looked up at Sav. "What say we get on the music stuff for awhile, mate?"

"I thought you wanted to do that somewhere else," Sav whispered. He cast a nervous sidelong glance toward the circulation desk out from under his curly fringe. "We've already been shushed once too, so I reckon we'd best not even think about showing a guitar in here now."

"Well, we can do that part somewhere else," Steve corrected under his breath. He held up his book for it, which he always kept in his bag even if he hadn't initially set off to work at it just because it was his favorite subject. "I still suppose I have to read some of the sections in this. I don't really feel like it -I don't understand why we've got to put complex terms to the simple things we know to do on guitar like bar chords and power chords."

"True. It's a bloody chord, for pity's sake." Even when he'd started on guitar, Sav just considered a chord by its root name or any inversion to it, and looked to tab to know what form it was in.

"But if I have to and you have to too for this, maybe it won't be so bad if we look through it together," said Steve. "Not as good as if I could demonstrate it for myself outside of here."

"Sure, mate, I can help you work through that until you can see it on the guitar. Maybe, at least reading it together might not be as tedious."

"And Sav, can we go move to one of the other common areas?"

Sav looked at his stack of books wearily, not entirely thrilled to move them all, but then to Steve with interest.

"Yes, though if you could tell me what for?"

"I've got to admit, you're not the only one intimidated by the lady behind the desk right now," whispered Steve with a light shudder. "She's giving me the creeps."

Another sidelong glance hidden by his bangs confirmed to Sav that they were still being watched closely with the stink eye. He turned to face completely away from her before allowing himself to smirk.

"Ah, good, let's pack it up and get the bloody hell away from this area then."

Steve lay his hand on Sav's wrist, stopping him when he went for more than two books at the same time, then helped Sav move them once he had his own books in his bag and on his back so his hands were freed.

"Thanks, mate." Sav smiled sheepishly.

"No problem."

"Or, you just don't want us to get shushed again," Sav teased.

"Stow it!" Steve hissed, blushing. "You don't want to either, and you know it too."

They found the common reading area -a section past the aisles of tall bookshelves that stood out by its architectural arrangement of floor to ceiling pillars that had electric fireplaces built in. There were some small book shelves above those fireplaces mounted on the pillars too where a mantle shelf would ordinarily be. Couches were arranged around them in circles, and finding an empty couch, Sav pointed it out.

Within minutes, he and Steve had settled in on the couch next to each other with their books and bags tucked beside their feet. The artificial blue and yellow flames cast a soft flickering over the pages as they spread their music theory textbook out across their laps, and a pleasant, warm glow followed it.

"Alright, so we'll start with the mandatory ten page section," Sav decided. 

It was better than Steve expected. With light banter between sections on each page, it was easier than trying to focus on his own in silence, and talking it out with Sav helped him process it. He would still need to pull out his guitar later to make sure he had it, but he was no longer lost in the pages, but rather, understanding and enjoying it.

Maybe that had to do just because he was in a pleasant place -with his best mate by a cozy fireplace in the nice environment of the library, and out of the line of sight of a trigger-happy shushing librarian. Regardless of what it was, by the time they got to the end of the section, Steve felt in no mood for departure, and seeing Sav was quite well settled in and looking a whole lot less flustered than he had over at the table, imagined he felt the same.

"Want to go on? What else have we got to go over?" he asked.

Sav raised an eyebrow, but thumbed through the pages to the additional sections recommended for study. "I thought you said you only wanted to read only the required section and get it over with. I figured I'd finish it by myself later."

Steve shrugged, watching Sav's fingers glide over the glossy textbook paper. The pads of his fingertips were already beginning to gather thicker callouses since his recent switch to playing bass.

"I don't really want to go back outside in that storm before I have to when it's nice in here," mused Steve. "And it's not that bad actually, working through it in here with you."

Sav hoped his mass of curls hid the mild blush across his cheeks, leaning forward for extra coverage as he found the right page.

"Well, let's get on with it then," he declared.

Steve leaned back into the couch, making himself comfortable to stay there a while. Sav seemed to notice and also settled in. Maybe they were leaning in too close against each other, but neither could bring themselves to care what someone walking through might think.

Some time later, after making it through all the pages, Steve glanced up to a wall clock placed up on another pillar across the common area.

"Bollocks, mate -look how long we've been here," he murmured.

Sav looked at the clock. Another hour had passed since they'd moved. He'd now been in the library for over three hours, and Steve was probably nearing nine.

That wasn't nearly as impressive as the time in general, considering they were just half an hour away from midnight.

"Are we the only ones here?" he asked, looking around the common area.

"At least in this section." Steve lowered to an even quieter whisper. "I imagine the night shift librarian is still at the desk, though, and probably every bit as antsy to shush whoever's left in here."

"If she is, we're not going to try to find out, that's for sure," Sav declared. "I suppose the real question is are we going to leave here now and continue tomorrow, move back to the tables to finish physics, or see if we can manage to work on that here?"

"Not so fond of the physics part, but if you're up for losing yourself in the library for the night, I'm good with staying right here." Steve gave a tired smile.

"Alright then." Sav pulled his book back up. "Maybe if we start working through problems together here instead of on our own like over there, it won't be quite as bad."

Steve snorted. "Better, possibly. Not going to count on it being fun though."

"What do you expect, mate? It's bleeding physics!" Sav playfully shoved Steve sideways before finding where he'd left off and laid out a single sheet of paper for them to work through together.

Steve broke through in a light giggle that he muffled with his fingers this time before settling back down for the less fun part of studying. But despite the tedium of the subject, it seemed to not matter that they had exams coming up, or that they had a bunch of other things to do. It simply mattered that they were together and hanging out, taking refuge from the boredom of studying at home and the biting rain in the warm, quiet common area of the city library.


End file.
